Endoscopic surgery has long been known as an effective technique for accomplishing surgical tasks in a minimally-invasive manner. This surgical technique, which utilizes small surgical tools advanced to a surgical site via small incisions in the patient's body, has significantly reduced the drawbacks of traditional open cavity surgery.
Somewhat more recently, transluminal/transgastric surgery has reduced the negative drawbacks of surgical intervention even further. Transluminal surgery utilizes one or more natural body orifices to introduce surgical instruments and equipment in order to minimize incisions. In transgastric surgery, for example, a surgical instrument is inserted into the patient's mouth and fed to the patient's stomach. The wall of the patient's stomach can then be punctured so that the instrument can access other parts of the patient's abdomen. An incision in the wall of the stomach is preferable to external incisions because there are no nerve endings in the stomach. Transgastric endoscopic surgery reduces patient pain and recovery time as well as the risk of infection.
Transluminal/transgastric surgery requires the use of surgical tools that can manipulate body tissue inside the patient's largely closed body cavity by a surgeon's hands outside of the body. Surgical tools appropriate for these surgical techniques traditionally have a handle for manipulating a tool portion that is located on an opposite end of an elongated middle portion.
In many transluminal/transgastric surgical systems, a primary instrument is inserted into the body and advanced to the surgical site. The primary instrument typically has one or more channels for inserting surgical tools, an optical channel, one or more light channels, and/or one or more channels for evacuation or insufflation. The overall size of the primary instrument is restricted, however, by the size limitations of the human body. This size restriction on the primary instrument limits the number of channels that can be used for surgical tools, etc. As a result it is often necessary to swap the tools inserted in the primary instrument and being used in a surgery during the surgery, sometimes multiple times. This requires that the tools be quickly accessible and swappable.
Next, surgical equipment for endoscopic surgery—especially transluminal/transgastric surgery—is precise, highly engineered equipment. Such equipment is expensive to acquire and to maintain. As a result, it can be cost intensive to provide surgeons with a full complement of the tools he or she might need to accomplish the surgical tasks typically encountered in a hospital or clinic.
What is needed therefore, is a medical instrument that enables a surgeon to quickly and safely swap surgical tools for use during an endoscopic surgery. What is also needed is a medical instrument that enables the reduction of repetitive equipment while still providing a full complement of surgical tools.